Issen is a high school English teacher as well as a college instructor of rhetoric and composition. In this essay, Issen considers the ways in which The Wedding articulates a new kind of masculinity that is in touch with traits previously considered feminine.

Critic Ben Steelman of Star News terms The Wedding a didactic novel, teaching men how to treat their wives, "like one of those epistolary novels of the 1700s, which were supposed to teach the rising middle class in England and the colonies how to behave." However, neither the themes nor the writing style targets a male audience. Indeed most critics, and even Nicholas Sparks himself, acknowledge that his readership is largely female. Sparks is a novelist who openly acknowledges that he writes what he thinks his readers—mainly female—want to read. He expresses this view in an interview on The Early Show shortly...